Fake Facts

There's "facts" that people believe, but aren't. Worse are things that the Fact Checkers on the left have verified for people as true, that aren't true, or are completely biased or misleading. Most are sincerely mislead. The question is when confronted with facts do they argue to death using an appeal to authority fallacy ("but CNN says it's true"), or are they open-minded free thinkers that look at the new information and weigh it against the prior evidence? It's not wether they agree with me or not that changes who they are. (They might have valid reasons for still not agreeing). But it's their approach to new information that makes the difference between a conscious (self-aware) human, or a herd following collectivist.

Fake Facts

Here's a list of these fake or misleading facts from all the left's favorite sources Snopes, FactCheck, Wikipedia, Politifact and so on. This is without getting into all the other FakeNews that people believe, or the fake fact checks by places like NYT, WaPo, MediaMatters or places that do occasional fact checks that are known polemic news outlets, or this list would be a lot longer:
58 items

Wikipedia on Trickle Down Economics - An example of Wikipedia's embarrassingly bad bias, poor writing, and misleading summary is the Wikipedia entry on Trickle Down Economics. It looks like it was written by a left wing polemic rather than anyone interested in economics or facts (or teaching). The Talk Section has a few interesting PoV's.

Wikipedia co-founder on bias - Even the co-founder of Wikipedia (Larry Sanger) admits that Wikipedia's NPOV (Neutral Point of View) is long dead and forgotten. He used examples such as:

Obama's article fails to list all the scandals, and Hillary's is spun heavily, while Trump's had 5,224 unflattering words and listed many debunked scandals.

Their abortion article says things like, "When properly done, abortion is one of the safest procedures in medicine".

Lies of omission on negative consequences of drug legalization policies, totally pro-LGBT adoption policies, their article on historical Jesus has many opinions as fact, and their pro-Vaccine position or Global warming omits or discounts the opposing views.

Warsaw Death Camp - For over 15 years, false claims that thousands of Poles were gassed to death in Warsaw in a widespread Holocaust distortion operation by Polish nationalists. This isn't denying the Holocaust happened, it just didn't happen there -- despite what you read on Wikipedia. The article has since been fixed/improved.

Trump Rally Violence - There's claims that Trump advocated violence at his rally's -- but that's not the whole context. Here's the facts: Hillary and the Democrats paid violent protestors to go to Trump Rally's and make scenes or beat people up. Trump said in his sloppy ways that if one of his protestors punched a guy in the face (who had first assaulted other people) or roughed them up on the way out (after they had assaulted other people) that he'd pay their legal bills. Fake News and Fake Fact Checkers omitted the context and claimed that Trump urged violence at his rally's. No, he urged defense and counter-violence against paid violent thugs that the Democrats put in his rally's, and omitting that context is a lie of omission. Defense against paid antifa thugs, isn't advocating for violence, and it isn't racist since the majority of them are white.

Tea Party - The railroading of the TeaParty is a great example of FakeNews. The TeaParty started under Bush, as a bunch of bi-partisan people angry at rising debt, and it escalated under Obama's trillion dollar porkulus. The media mocked them as radicals, racists and domestic terrorists and called them TeaBaggers (after the sexual practice of sucking testicles), and after 4 years of false stories were able to drive-out the moderates and democrats, leaving mostly the religious right (as they were used to being bullied and lied about). If you read places like Wikipedia, or listen to the left-wing news, you'll get none of that context/backstory (or history of how they moved right over time), leaving readers/viewers with a view that's quite different from reality. But their treatment by the media/left was a great example of the confluence of ignorance and arrogance about them and their issues.

Sharyl Attkisson did an amusing video on the age of astroturf, and how what people see if manipulated. She dived into fake medical stories, and Wikipedia. She deconstructed the problem with Wikipedia when author Philip Roth was not allowed to make edits on his own page, because he wasn't considered a credible source to comment on himself or his books characters. Or that there were paid promoters editors on there, or an audit had 90% of their medical articles disagreeing with medical research, and so on.

There's this idea that Red Flag laws might help -- that people could flag people who are at risk and get their guns taken away from them. It sounds good, as long as you don't think about it. However if you think it through: (a) most mass shooters most don't give warnings = all false positives (b) if you lower the bar enough that the red-flag laws apply, then everyone is guilty = all false negatives (c) it only forces shooters to wait (d) they just get/steal other guns or they can go to more deadly methods (e) it's already been abused where tried (f) Think SWATting someone (g) there's never been a study that shows that they help prevent gun violence (and they've tried to find justification in the past, many times). So while I'm not against the theory, there's no practical way to implement it, that wouldn't be a cluster-fuck and worse than doing nothing. On top of that, 75-80% of gun violence is gang related, so Democrats have blocked Republicans efforts to get Red Flag laws applied to Gangs: seriously. (They don't want to fix the problem, they want to punish the innocent).

Racism Claims - Ilhan has had a series of racially insensitive claims, especially against Jews/Israel. Not all of them are up to MY standards of racism (racially insensitive isn't racist, unless the folks believe the entire race is inferior to another) -- but that's not the standard the left uses. By their standards, she'd be racist, so they want to do nothing to censure her, because she's a Democrat and a protected class. A Republican would have been excoriated for a fraction of the following:

saying that the only reason Republicans support Israel is their money and AIPAC.

She supports the anti-semitic BDS (boycott, divest and sanction) movement which wants to destroy Israel

claimed pro-Israel lawmakers hold dual loyalty, twice (touching on an old racist trope, and doubling down when called on it)

claimed that Israel (Jews) "hypnotized the world" and did "evil things", both also old racist dirty-Jew tropes .

If you think people like you are better than everyone else, and those that aren't are inferior, you're a racist. Like she does with constantly bragging about the women of color, and demeaning those who aren't.

If you falsely claim someone else is racist, that's racist. (Assuming you only do that to people who aren't of color). Omar does this to individuals and the entire nation. If you don't agree with her, and aren't of color, you're a racist. (Which means she's a racist to judge everyone by their color and see them through that lens).

In 2018, when asked by Al Jezeera about some people's legitimate concerns about Jihadist terrorism, she dodged and claimed "the country should be more fearful of White Men", and we should be profiling, monitoring and racially profiling, to prevent their radicalization. She might have been trying to flip the attack around, but it was awkward, math challenged and racist. Can you imagine if Trump said something so gosh about Blacks or Muslims? To date, no "journalist" has bothered to ask her to defend/clarify that inflammatory claims, but a few Fake Facts outlets like Politifact tried to carry her water and make excuses for it.

Panhandling - There's a saying, you get what you incentivize. So if you pay people to be poor, it's amazing how many people will suddenly become poor. An example is this panhandler that makes $1,000 a weekend in Texas, by pretending to be homeless and wheelchair bound. He has a home and walks just fine. In NYC one guy was making $200/hour. An Oklahoma guy made $60K/year. This is nothing new, welfare scams have been endemic since people figured out that the givers are lazy rubes that want to feel better about themselves, more than they want to prove the recipient is a fraud. FakeFact checkers like Snopes claim that the $50/hour claim is unproven -- but so are all their claims on the topic. They ignore the outliers to prove their claim -- better would be if they just admitted that's likely not the norm, but completely in the realm of probability.

New Yorker first radically misrepresents the issue at stake in the Supreme Court Hobby Lobby case. When publicly corrected, they make a correction, and then misspells and mis-names the Solicitor General of the U.S. And they quoted Toobin's mischaracterization of what the religious freedom law was.

The Economist ran an oft quoted FakeNews story that any first year economics student should call bullshit on. It was that red states get a surplus of tax benefits, because of subsidies by blue states. The truth is that for each $1.00 New Jersey gets back from the fed, they have to give the fed $1.64 in taxes, they have to pay $.18 in compliance costs, and the government borrows about $.81 of that dollar, and sticks New Jersey with the debt obligation. On top of that, federal work-rules and controls means that dollar is actually only about as effective as $.60 would be if it was under local or private hiring practices. Progressives see the $.60 of real value as a net win. Anyone else, can see that you paid about $2.63 to get it. This isn't as dramatic for some red states, but the only states that come out ahead are West Virginia, Mississippi, New Mexico and Puerto Rico (and D.C.). So if any publication repeats the lie of the Red states mooching off the Blue ones, you know they don't have fact checkers, or are just partisan shills.

NOOA Temp Fraud - Mann and his faked Hockey Stick, is not the only group caught altering the historical record. NOOA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) was taken over by far left anti-Science polemics, and since they control some of the surface temperature measurements for the Country (and thus influences the world's records), and they got caught altering that record for political purposes. They wiped out the historical record of the hottest years being in the 1930's (not today), whether by accident or incompetence doesn't change the outcome. Of course Snopes got involved, didn't bother to contact the author of the refutation, then misrepresented the facts. Remember, they are the FakeNews site that Google and Facebook use as a prime source they use to filter stories: to decide what is a trusted source or change their search rankings.

Married her brother - There's a rumor that she married her brother (Ahmed Hirsi) to get around immigration law. There is no doubt that something extremely suspicious and illegal (immigration fraud) appears to be going on, and has been known for some time. But she won't answer questions about it and attacks anyone who asks as racist. Leftist news sources like Snopes seem to be disinterested and only cover it to do very cursory investigations and find excuses to waive off any accusations as conspiracy theory. But David Steinberg (at powerline) has a lot of interesting points that are not just wild conspiracy stuff. There's more than enough to do a deep investigation of any conservative -- but the press seems to take her word that there's nothing there. (Their job is not to trust, but to verify).

Troopergate was where Bill Clinton allegedly used Arkansas state police assigned to his security detail, to keep an eye out for Hillary or ferry women in and out of the Governors mansion for him (as well as keep track of his sexual scoring system). While Hillary was using state troopers to take her to clandestine meetings with Vince Foster at a resort (for an alleged affair). Most of the media ignored the story, as they didn't want to harm their change-agent du jour, but then this lead to Paula Jones and many others, and even they couldn't ignore that much salaciousness.

Despite 4 different troopers corroborating the stories (multiple Women coming forward or being discovered, including Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers), and writer David Brock documenting many details of times, dates, with corroborating witnesses, he later apologized to Bill Clinton for breaking the story. The troopers had gotten paid for telling their stories, and he considered that a violation of journalistic ethics. Of course, most of the accounts still appear to be true, but that doesn't matter to Clinton supporters.

Clinton friend Harry Thompson (and his TRM charter company) had wanted to do some charter business with the WhiteHouse Travel office, but was rebuffed (they were a relatively new company, and their only client the year before had been the Clinton Campaign).

Hillary got involved, spread some lies about the travel office, she pressured the FBI to investigate them, and 7 people were fired (and smeared in the Press) because of it.

The investigations into the fired staff resulted in one employee (Billy Dale) being charged with mixing personal and White House funds, and a jury acquitted him of any crime (in less than two hours). So he got audited by the IRS (completely coincidentally, I'm sure). Nothing came of that either.

Then with the help of Bill Clinton's 25 year old cousin (Catherine Cornelius), Clinton cronies WWT (World Wide Travel) took over the business, and Harry Thompson's TRM got a $500K no-bid contract.

At least this one caused a media field day, on the abuse of FBI, investigation, firing, cronies and so on. WWT was so embarrassed they stepped down (and let American Express take over the business). And it lead to NYT writer, William Safire to describe Hillary Clinton as "a congenital liar". (When the NYT speaks truth about a Clinton, you know it's bad).

After leaving the White House, Hillary was forced to return an estimated $190,000 in White House furniture, china, and artwork that she had taken. Again, there's a lot of "weeds" as to whether gifts were given to them personally or the Whitehouse, how big personal gifts are allowed to be, but the end result is always that nothing like this ever happened to any President before, even the classless ones. And the Clintons water carriers in the media fake "Fact Checked" this and tried to exonerate the Clintons by word parsing or misleading the public on what happened.

Appointed to Staff of House Judiciary Committee during Watergate. She was "fired" for corrupt and unethical behavior, according to lifelong democrats in charge of the house investigation Dan Calbrese and Jerry Zeifman Ziefman has since been smeared by the Hilary campaign machine (WaPo and Snopes), for the hairsplitting mistake that he technically he could not "fire her" (as she wasn't a direct report to his committee, he could only recommend she be removed). Also they claimed that all her unethical behavior might have been at the suggestion of her bosses (it's always someone else's fault). The pattern of getting in the middle of scandals, being accused of questionable ethics by those closest to her, and "losing evidence" seemed to follow her through her life... along with her defenders making lame excuses for it.

Without any experience, as a first time Cattle Futures trader (and wife of Governor), she gets a 9,987% return on investment in a few months, after, according to her, "reading the Wall Street Journal" (a paper that doesn't talk about Cattle Futures). With results like that, she decides to never trade stocks/commodities again. Suspicious? So we're to believe that under the guidance of a few "friends" (her account being run by a lawyer for state poultry interests, through a disreputable broker) she turns $6,300 investment into $100K (a nice even number) in a few months, with shoddy and lost records, questionable trades, not enough money in her account to cover some of the $1.5M positions she bought/sold in the same day (anyone else would have had margin calls), and other eyebrow raising anomalies. Then her two partners in this (Bone and Refco) were suspended and fined respectively for improper records keeping. But nothing to see here, move along -- we're not supposed to question her integrity, or think that this might have been a payoff?

There's all the scandals that she got caught lying in (after accusing the other side of lying). And there are many more stories of her being an angry shrew that yelled a lot, and threw things, and the Whitehouse staff didn't like her, at all. (These stories kept coming out). In polls, more people believe in Bigfoot (14%) than Hillary being honest (11%). (Really). While I don't mind a tough-minded President or candidate (or even a "bitchy" one, at times), there's a difference between occasionally coming down on people, and just being nasty to be around or a bully. Many close to her tell the same story about her being nasty, bully, corrupt and a liar. Books have been written calling her, 'the Lady Macbeth of Little Rock", her household cook in Littlerock said, "The devil’s in that woman". While anecdotes aren't proof, when there are so many, over so many years, you have to be an idiot (or partisan) to assume that they're ALL false. Is everyone out to get this poor innocent altruist saint? Even Snopes has to admit it's at least partly true, though they focus on the little stuff to distract from the bigger picture.

Republicans (and Sarah Palin) started using the term "Death Panels" to describe part of the ACA, where a panel of 15 (called IPAB) could make life and death decisions over what treatments would be covered or not (which would control costs). Of course the left all called that untrue, but accounted for the savings these panels would bring by denying care, and far left places like Politifact called this the lie of the year in 2009. Then they screamed again when those panels that never existed were eliminated in 2018.

2019.10.16 Chick-fil-A Uganda - FactChecking the Chick-fil-a supports an organization that sponsored Ugandan's death penalty for homosexuality bill, Snopes gets it all wrong. The facts are: (1) There is no current consideration for such a bill (2) Chick-fil-a donates to WinShape charity, which doesn't sponsor NCF (NCF sponsors WinShape) (3) NCF did once support a variant of a bill (back in 2010) that included that... and WinShape stopped contributing to them as soon as they found out. (4) Chik-fil-a has not supported legislative campaigns of any kind in Uganda. No charitable organization can know that every charity they support, might support another charity (twice or thrice removed) that might support something they don't like. The left would never hold themselves to that standard... but they hold conservatives to that standard, and then mislead people by pretending its the parent organization doing it, and get the basic facts wrong while fact checking it.

To play off of anti-Trumpism, Georgia Democrat and State Rep (Erica Thomas) claimed in a sobbing twitter post, that at a Publix Grocery store, a “white man” called her a “lazy son of a bitch” and told her to “go back to where she came from" and that “People are getting really out of control with this white privilege stuff.” Then to her surprise, Eric Sparkes, the accused man who is an anti-Trump, far-left, AOC supporting Cuban (not white), stepped forward and called bullshit. He explained that she had 20 items in the express lane limited for 10 (and there were two other lanes open). He complained to the store associates, but they told him to tell her... so he did so politely. When he did that, witnesses and store videos seen to corroborate that SHE got in his face and got confrontational and then SHE told HIM to "go back where he came from", repeatedly... and then he called her a "lazy bitch" for holding everyone else up and making a scene. But Eric never told Erica to "go back to where you came from" and she was lying/grandstanding. If racism is such a big problem in America, why does the left keep getting caught making up examples of it? FakeFactCheck outlet Snopes misleads their readers on what happened, by not fact checking the claim that Erica Thomas made, but by fact checking satire site Babylon Bee's post that claimed it happened at a Chick-fil-a, and then leaving out a ton of context that would make her look bad from their explanation. So they did correctly say that the Bee story was false, but only readers far more cautious than 99% of Democrats would notice that bait-and-switch, and any that read the omitted context snopes version of events wouldn't know about a bunch of evidence that makes Erica and the Democrats/media look bad.

2019.04.02 Misleading Teacher Salary claims - Harris put out a completely deceptive and dishonest claim, "that teachers pay is falling short of living wage in 30 states" and we need the fed to help. FakeNews Politifact backed her up, because completely misleading, if you parse everything she said in a way that most of her readers won't, then she's technically not wrong, so they mislabelled it as mostly true. Something they'd never do for a conservative.

2019.03.26 Wikipedia editors take money to alter stories - The facade that Wikipedia is non-partisan is crushed when their editors (like Ed Sussman) get caught altering the tone/content for cash. (Pay-for-whitewash). And the list of payers is a whose who of leftist organizations: Facebook, NBC, Nextdoor, Axios, CNN, Intel, and so on. Of course this comes to a surprise to noone who has ever tried to edit a wikipedia page only to run headlong into one of their editors hypocritical double-standards on what qualifies as worthy. But it's another drop of paint on the mural that makes up their brand.

2019.03.08 AOC Campaign Finance Scandal - 👮 Ocasio-Cortez and Saikat Chakrabarti (Chief of staff, former campaign chair), appear to have obtained majority control of Justice Democrats PAC in December 2017, raised more than $1.8M (and was responsible for her win), and illegally diverted more than $1M of those funds. If AOC and Chakrabarti withheld their control of that organization from the FEC to divert funds around campaign limits, they could face jail time. Either way, this is the Dark Money that AOC ran on curtailing. All the FakeNews misrepresented or omitted context on what happened: CNN, ABC, NBC, WaPo, BI, MarketWatch and Snopes.

2019.02.07 Green New Deal - 🍉 The Green New Deal was a program championed by AOC, endorsed by the left, that confirms everything conservatives have been warning about the Watermelon Environmental Movement: their goal is not to save the planet, but use that to enact communism/socialism in the U.S. This $93 Trillion boondoggle admits wanting to destroy the coal, oil, airline industry, and replace planes to Hawaii with trains, and replace every building in the U.S. force everyone to go vegetarian (and eliminate cow-farts), within 10 years. Oh and complete wealth redistribution, 70%+ taxes, and so on. Politifact is of course flagging people as false for pointing this out, because they meant it, "perhaps in jest", even though there was not a scintilla of evidence of that.

2019.01.20 Covington Catholic High School - 💩The New York Times published an article “Boys in ‘Make America Great Again’ Hats Mob Native American Elder at Indigenous People’s March,” and many other outlets (CNN, WaPo, etc), piled on without verifying. OrangeMan is so bad, that just wearing his hat makes you a racist. Only, the details leaked out that it was the Catholic teens minding their own business (on a class trip) when the Native American demonstrator/activist (Nathan Phillips: not a Vietnam War Veteran as WaPo and other claimed) marched up, beat drums, push into center of student group, call teens names, and then accused the kids of surrounding him and saying racist things, all false.

2018.12.06 Voted out of Congress - A viral claimed “Everyone with an X has since been voted out of Congress.”, but a few members with an X were never in Congress. Snopes still claimed that the “general idea” of the meme was “correct.”

2018.10.03 Breitbart Blacklisted by Wikipedia - You don't have to like Breitbart, to admit that it's a news source that's broken some pretty good scoops, and done some serious investigative journalism. They of course have an obvious bias, but so do all the others. Banning Breitbart as a trusted news source, without being able to site examples of why or what standard they broke that others they tolerate hasn't as well, is pure leftist politics. It's like Joseph Stalin purging figures of people he didn't like from Soviet history. At least while still allowing partisan sources such as CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, NYT, WaPo and HuffPo. Pick a standard, and ban everyone based on that. But you don't get to have arbitrary standards. So the fact that the latter is blanket allowed, and the former is not, is not a reflection on Breitbart's bias but on Wikipedia's.

2018.08.05 Sarah Jeong - Wikipedia Entry - As Christina Sommers points out, you can look on Wikipedia page for Sarah Jeong (known racist and NYT writer), and that stuff is being actively suppressed. You could follow the debate on the talk page, but like before, it's the usual -- a bunch of people want to suppress the truth, so simple statements of fact like "Sarah incited controversy for a series of insensitive tweets" gets blocked while debate is going on. Eventually, most of it gets sorted out, if you write it in a neutral enough way and they're left leaning, or slightly more incendiary terms if they are right leaning.

2018.05 Cagegate - This FakeNews fiasco was the fallacy that Trump's new immigration policy was breaking up families and putting kids in cages. The omitted reality was criminals (border jumpers) have always had the kids separated from the adults, as you aren't sure who are parents, and detaining both in the same place risks harm to children. The media even used faked propaganda images from Obama era to sell it.

2018.04.25 Bible Ban - You can have religious liberty, or a Democrat controlled government, but as California Assembly Bill 2943 shows, rarely both. Basically, it says no church or individual can practice "conversion therapy", or "pray the gay away". While I don't think those are useful, in a country with religious liberty, you don't outlaw stupid things just because you don't agree. And Fact Checkers like Snopes/FactCheck do their jobs and report the facts, instead of doing mental gymnastics to defend Democrats from themselves.

2018.04.22 YETI Coolers - In the wake of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, YETI Coolers cut off ties to the NRA Foundation (the shooting sports division), but wouldn't say why (coincidentally timed with Delta and REI dropping the NRA). This somewhat dickish move, and the NRA's open letter, lead to backlash amongst shooting enthusiasts, many shooting their coolers for YouTube, and YETI's competitors stepping up their 2A support. Of course WaPo and Snopes "FakeChecked" by taking YETI's damage-control effort claim that they were just ending an old promotional program (that didn't apply to anyone else, they wouldn't fulfill outstanding orders, and doesn't explain the timing or lack of communication or remedy). The "Press" didn't wait for NRA's reply to that, which sounded a lot like: {cough:bullshit!}.

2017.11.13 Roy Moore Manipulation - While I'm no fan of Roy Moore, anyone that didn't support the far left narrative on Wikipedia was attacked, then banned for defending themselves.

2017.11.02 Questioning the Russian Hacker Narrative - When an AP report mentioned that Russians were hacking anyone who opposed Russian interest (not just Hillary Clinton), it started a discussion over purging anything that didn't fit the "Russians hacked 2016 election because they wanted Trump to win" narrative. An editor that objected to censoring counter-points was attacked and banned for trying to defend a little balance.

2017.09.17 downplaying Antifa’s violent extremism - An article on the violent Antifa movement was created. Left-wing editors removed or minimized mentions of the group’s violent history before their violence at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. But following the violence, this suppression got to the point where the article’s only mentions of violence, far left activism, or tha government agencies characterized them as a terrorist group were in the headlines of sources. Then added material portraying Antifa as victims of smear campaign. Often done by editors who had support for Antifa on their profile pages.

2017.07.04 Burying CNN Blackmail Controversy - There was a page created on CNN’s blackmail controversy (where CNN threatened to dox someone). Other editors stepped in, and buried the lede and much of the factual content, not because of standards, but because it made CNN look bad (by telling the truth). Efforts to restore the material were met with a wall of double standards or outright censorship.

2017.07 James Damore evidence tampering - When Google employee James Damore’s memo on the company’s diversity programs and treatment of conservative views went viral, editors on Wikipedia began removing reliably-sourced parts of articles he cited to support his positions. When the truth doesn't favor the left, the left tries to erase the truth from History, like the little Stalins they are.

2017.05.25 NATO - Trump criticized NATO (as he has during his campaign) for bearing the brunt of NATO costs (true), and intimidates them into living up to their obligations and coming up with more money. The leftists, their Press and their fact checkers all pretend this is end of days and proof that:

Demanding more defense spending (against Russia) makes him a puppet of Russia.

That him claiming the U.S. pays 70-90% of NATO is a lie. It's true... depending on what you mean.

He "shoved" Montenegro Prime Minister.

That he's alienating our allies and going to break up NATO.

A year+ later, the head of NATO admits that his tough talk got NATO contributions up by over $100B, and it is stronger than ever, thanks to Trump.

2017.04.11 Spicer: Hitler didn't use chemical weapons - Sean Spicer (WhiteHouse Press Secretary) while talking about Assad (Syria) use of chemical weapons, misspoke (said something completely true but inartfully worded) and corrected himself (clarified that "as a tool of war" and not talking about gassing civilians) and apologized all in the same news-conference. Far left outfits like CNN, CBS, MSNBC, Snopes, Politifact, all ignored the correction/clarification and used the gaff as a way to attack Spicer and Trump, and spin a non-story into evidence of why they were a bad administration. They also ignored many cases where others on the left had said the same truth. Lies of omission, and sensationalism, are evidence of propaganda/FakeNews.

2017.03.05 Rasmea Odeh - The March 8th "Day Without A Woman" protest was created by Rasmea: a Palestinian anti-semite terrorist, guilty of a 1969 bombing and murder of 2 in Israel. Snopes took the far left BDS/Palestinian position of using false and debunked excuses for her behavior.

2017.02.28 Sitting for Seal Widow - This is a famous case where the Democrats were remaining seated during Trump's first address to congress in 2017, in protest of his very existence. As Ben Shapiro wrote, the Democrats unfortuitously decided to keep their asses planted for the 2nd standing ovation for a Navy Seal who gave his life (and his widow), and PolitiFact, FactCheck and Snopes misrepresented their stories to not make the Democrats look as bad as their contemptuous partisan behavior had been for the whole night, or to make it look like Ben Shapiro had misrepresented things that he had not.

2017.01.20 Scrubbed Climate Change and LGBT - ZOMG: Minutes in, and Trump is purging the Government (White House Website) of LGBT and Climate Change info: OrangeMan Bad! Only, this normal operating procedure to archive the old White House pages and start fresh (it happened under Clinton->Bush and Bush->Obama). No retractions, corrections or apologies given.

2017.01 UC Berkeley Prof trades wiki-edits for grades - UC Berkeley instructor Michel Gelobter launched a course whose course description gave students grades based on their willingness to advance an “environmental justice” narrative, by altering Wikipedia pages. Of course it openly slurred President Trump with falsehoods to filter out the rational and net the radical follower trolls. Eventually, Wikipedia editors did delete some of the more egregious additions, but many remained.

2016.07.26 Flags at DNC - Conservative media outlets (like DC) noted that the American flag was conspicuously physically absent on the set of the Democratic National Convention on its first day. Left-of-center Politifact admitted it too. But liberal media went into full-spin mode. Snopes shifted from unbiased fact checker to DNC operative. They "debunked" straw-men: (a) they were on stage in digital form or in the audience on day-2 (no one said they weren't) (b) they showed the flags on stage Day-2 and misattributed to Day-1. Then changed the claim to "on stage at all. Rephrasing the question until the answer is correct, is not fact checking assholes.

2016.07.07 Omar Mateen a Democrat - After the left tried to paint Orlando nightclub shooter (Omar Mateen) as a conservative anti-Gay person, a few places pointed out he was registered to vote as a Democrat (and was a Muslim that didn't appear to know/care it was a gay nightclub). Snopes jumped in to defend their allies on the left, and did logic-yoga to conclude that while Omar might have registered as a Democrat, he might have changed his mind between registration and hit mass-murder.

2016.05.06 Birth of Birthers - Fact checkers (CNN, Politifact, Snopes, FactCheck) answered whether Hillary originated the Birther movement, and exonerated her. It was only her top strategists plan and her campaign staffers, but not her personally -- so they pretended that Trump was lying to imply she had anything to do with creating these rumors that her campaign gleefully twisted and spread. So dishonest.

2016.05.02 Hillary and the Rapist - One complaint was against Hillary for laughing about getting a child rapist off when she was a defense lawyer. This was true. Even lefty-FactCheck admitted it was true. But Snopes, WaPo and Politifact parsed words, inferred intent (It was just a nervous laugh), and went beyond fact checking into water-carrier status. The truth is she did defend a rapist, she did laugh about getting him off, and she helped get him off by attacking the victim.

2015.07.21 Holistic Doctors - Erin Elizabeth of HealthNutNews complains about how snopes wronged her, with getting lots of little factoids wrong, on her conspiratorial article about 5 Holistic Doctors found dead (later the number grew to 60). Not sure who I believe in this one, but Erin definitely went full vendetta on many mistakes she found not only in misrepresenting her article, but in others. And at least a few of her complaints seem legit.

2014.08.06 VoterID Fraud - NYU: Justin Levitt did a "Study" that found only 31 convictions of voter fraud. Thus he started the myth that since we don't have a way to catch people doing it (without VoterID), then the problem must not exist. This study was first published, without any logical counter-balance, in WaPo, and is regurgitated and quoted in all far left outlets (like Politifact). Only it's bullshit, been debunked and refuted, and lots of studies show the opposite. WaPo has never corrected it, and in fact, recycles it every 2 years around election time. They are either incompetent and don't know the basics of the topic, or they are intentionally and maliciously deceiving their rubes (readers), or both.

When Republican Politician (Jim Rubens) used a shoddy study (that used only 10 examples) that claimed armed civilians drastically reduce casualties during mass shootings, PolitiFact slammed it as false.... by using a worse study to refute it: their "expert" could only find 3 cases of a DGU's (Defensive Gun Uses) stopping a mass shooting? I show dozens in my Mass shootings stopped by armed civilians article, without even trying. So while the issue is complex, and no one is going to agree on an exact number reduced, there's zero doubt (to the informed) that civilians with guns have reduced casualties in mass shootings. Claiming that as completely false, is completely dishonest. The only debate is how "drastically" it has helped.

2013.12.12 Obama and Politifact share lie of the year - From 2008-2013 Politifact rated Obamacare's "If you like your plan, you can keep your Health Plan" (or Doctor) promises as true, and rated everyone who called it untrue, as a liar (on their truth-o-meter). In 2013, they added a reader poll for "lie of the year", and while they didn't put that as one of the choices, so many readers wrote it in that they had to finally admit that it was a lie all along... and it was given the lie of the year (4 years late). But they didn't fix all the times they called anyone else a liar who had said it was false: in fact, they mislead people (lied) by linking back to some select articles where they had called other people a liar, by rating it as only partly true -- and didn't fix those articles. So they lied, then admitting the truth when it was too late, then lied about lying in the first place. And the only reason they admitted the truth (despite trying to bury it) was because of reader revolt making them admit it.

2013.05.16 Open Border Hillary - Wikileaks leaked the text of private, paid speech to a Brazilian bank where Clinton said: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders..." 3 years later, Politifact, FactCheck and CNN were claiming that Hillary never said or meant it, and spent their energies defending her reputation instead of communicating what was said and leaving it up to their readers.

2013.04.27 Good enough - While it is a little stale (2013) and things changed after a few more liberal editors and the 2016 election, Snopes does do a reasonably good enough job at debunking the easy and non-political stuff. Even if they miss on a few, or are slow to correct others. At least for the skeptical libertarian.

2012.08.15 Family Research Council Shooting - 🇺🇲 Washington, DC: Floyd Lee Corkins was a gay activist who was triggered by the SPLC list of hate groups. So he went to the one: the near-by Family Research Council. He took a handgun, two extra magazines of ammo, and sandwiches from Chick-fil-A to smear in the faces of his victims and opened fire at the local FRC office: fortunately he only hit one security guard who disarmed and apprehended him. If a conservative had done that after a sermon at a church or based on anything a conservative group said, that group would be listed as a domestic terrorist organization by SPLC, and the media would trash that organization. Since it was the SPLC, the story was buried and the tone was, "you can't use a fanatic to misrepresent a whole cause", a standard never applied to the right.

2009.12.18 Death Panels - A great example of carrying Obama's water, is to take something that's true like Obamacare (ACA) has clauses where there will be "death panel" -- e.g. government bureaucrats and administrators will be on a board determining what care someone should/shouldn't be entitled to, and is making life and death decisions over patient coverage. Instead of ignoring it, they write long winded distracting articles that try to convince their base that "Death Panel" is the "Lie of year", because it's not a panel that will vote to kill you, it's a panel that will vote to deny you coverage and the disease/malady will kill you. The longer a PolitiFact article is, the more wrong (political) it usually is.

2002.10.12 Up-the-butt Bob - There was a famous Newlywed gameshow story, where a female contestant was asked "what's the strangest place you made whoopee" and she replied, "that'd be up the butt, Bob". The problem isn't that Snopes is wrong today, they found the clip and the article has a lot of backstory. The problem is that they were famously wrong on the story for years. Once they got around to correcting it, they omitted that it was a correction, and seem to have made some effort to scrub the mistake.

2001.03.01 T.R.O.L.L. - Snopes had a whole section for spreading disinformation called "The Repository of Lost Legends" or T.R.O.L.L. While it was intended to teach skepticism, by telling things that weren't true, and seeing if people would figure it out -- it was just condescending misinformation and hurt their brand of being a trustworthy source. So while they were the purveyors of FakeNews, it is more notable lore and a statement on their questionable judgment, rather than their bias/dishonesty.

Trump Rally Violence - There's claims that Trump advocated violence at his rally's -- but that's not the whole context. Here's the facts: Hillary and the Democrats paid violent protestors to go to Trump Rally's and make scenes or beat people up. Trump said in his sloppy ways that if one of his protestors punched a guy in the face (who had first assaulted other people) or roughed them up on the way out (after they had assaulted other people) that he'd pay their legal bills. Fake News and Fake Fact Checkers omitted the context and claimed that Trump urged violence at his rally's. No, he urged defense and counter-violence against paid violent thugs that the Democrats put in his rally's, and omitting that context is a lie of omission. Defense against paid antifa thugs, isn't advocating for violence, and it isn't racist since the majority of them are white.

While some partisan sources (FakeNews like Atlantic, FactCheck) will try to spin it as minor “pranks”, reflecting the Clinton Administration’s classlessness, the GAO’s admits that they did $13-14K in widespread vandalism to the WhiteHouse: glue desk drawers shut, profane signs, graffiti and insults on voice mail, destroying 62 computer keyboards and 26 cell phones, massive cleaning bills and stealing or breaking doorknobs, medallions, office signs and the large presidential seal. Of course when the allegations went public, the Democrats tried to spin it that it wasn't THAT bad, and it was tacky of the Republicans to whine about it and make felonious destruction of public property look like anything bad?

Troopergate was where Bill Clinton allegedly used Arkansas state police assigned to his security detail, to keep an eye out for Hillary or ferry women in and out of the Governors mansion for him (as well as keep track of his sexual scoring system). While Hillary was using state troopers to take her to clandestine meetings with Vince Foster at a resort (for an alleged affair). Most of the media ignored the story, as they didn't want to harm their change-agent du jour, but then this lead to Paula Jones and many others, and even they couldn't ignore that much salaciousness.

Despite 4 different troopers corroborating the stories (multiple Women coming forward or being discovered, including Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers), and writer David Brock documenting many details of times, dates, with corroborating witnesses, he later apologized to Bill Clinton for breaking the story. The troopers had gotten paid for telling their stories, and he considered that a violation of journalistic ethics. Of course, most of the accounts still appear to be true, but that doesn't matter to Clinton supporters.

Clinton friend Harry Thompson (and his TRM charter company) had wanted to do some charter business with the WhiteHouse Travel office, but was rebuffed (they were a relatively new company, and their only client the year before had been the Clinton Campaign).

Hillary got involved, spread some lies about the travel office, she pressured the FBI to investigate them, and 7 people were fired (and smeared in the Press) because of it.

The investigations into the fired staff resulted in one employee (Billy Dale) being charged with mixing personal and White House funds, and a jury acquitted him of any crime (in less than two hours). So he got audited by the IRS (completely coincidentally, I'm sure). Nothing came of that either.

Then with the help of Bill Clinton's 25 year old cousin (Catherine Cornelius), Clinton cronies WWT (World Wide Travel) took over the business, and Harry Thompson's TRM got a $500K no-bid contract.

At least this one caused a media field day, on the abuse of FBI, investigation, firing, cronies and so on. WWT was so embarrassed they stepped down (and let American Express take over the business). And it lead to NYT writer, William Safire to describe Hillary Clinton as "a congenital liar". (When the NYT speaks truth about a Clinton, you know it's bad).

After leaving the White House, Hillary was forced to return an estimated $190,000 in White House furniture, china, and artwork that she had taken. Again, there's a lot of "weeds" as to whether gifts were given to them personally or the Whitehouse, how big personal gifts are allowed to be, but the end result is always that nothing like this ever happened to any President before, even the classless ones. And the Clintons water carriers in the media fake "Fact Checked" this and tried to exonerate the Clintons by word parsing or misleading the public on what happened.

Without any experience, as a first time Cattle Futures trader (and wife of Governor), she gets a 9,987% return on investment in a few months, after, according to her, "reading the Wall Street Journal" (a paper that doesn't talk about Cattle Futures). With results like that, she decides to never trade stocks/commodities again. Suspicious? So we're to believe that under the guidance of a few "friends" (her account being run by a lawyer for state poultry interests, through a disreputable broker) she turns $6,300 investment into $100K (a nice even number) in a few months, with shoddy and lost records, questionable trades, not enough money in her account to cover some of the $1.5M positions she bought/sold in the same day (anyone else would have had margin calls), and other eyebrow raising anomalies. Then her two partners in this (Bone and Refco) were suspended and fined respectively for improper records keeping. But nothing to see here, move along -- we're not supposed to question her integrity, or think that this might have been a payoff?

2018.05 Cagegate - This FakeNews fiasco was the fallacy that Trump's new immigration policy was breaking up families and putting kids in cages. The omitted reality was criminals (border jumpers) have always had the kids separated from the adults, as you aren't sure who are parents, and detaining both in the same place risks harm to children. The media even used faked propaganda images from Obama era to sell it.

2018.04.25 Bible Ban - You can have religious liberty, or a Democrat controlled government, but as California Assembly Bill 2943 shows, rarely both. Basically, it says no church or individual can practice "conversion therapy", or "pray the gay away". While I don't think those are useful, in a country with religious liberty, you don't outlaw stupid things just because you don't agree. And Fact Checkers like Snopes/FactCheck do their jobs and report the facts, instead of doing mental gymnastics to defend Democrats from themselves.

2017.02.28 Sitting for Seal Widow - This is a famous case where the Democrats were remaining seated during Trump's first address to congress in 2017, in protest of his very existence. As Ben Shapiro wrote, the Democrats unfortuitously decided to keep their asses planted for the 2nd standing ovation for a Navy Seal who gave his life (and his widow), and PolitiFact, FactCheck and Snopes misrepresented their stories to not make the Democrats look as bad as their contemptuous partisan behavior had been for the whole night, or to make it look like Ben Shapiro had misrepresented things that he had not.

2016.05.06 Birth of Birthers - Fact checkers (CNN, Politifact, Snopes, FactCheck) answered whether Hillary originated the Birther movement, and exonerated her. It was only her top strategists plan and her campaign staffers, but not her personally -- so they pretended that Trump was lying to imply she had anything to do with creating these rumors that her campaign gleefully twisted and spread. So dishonest.

2013.05.16 Open Border Hillary - Wikileaks leaked the text of private, paid speech to a Brazilian bank where Clinton said: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders..." 3 years later, Politifact, FactCheck and CNN were claiming that Hillary never said or meant it, and spent their energies defending her reputation instead of communicating what was said and leaving it up to their readers.

2012.07.13 You didn't build that - One of the defining phrases of the Obama Administration was Obama's attack on private companies which went, "You didn't build that"... basically you owe government for the company you created since they supplied the infrastructure needed. The truth is the opposite, without government we'd still have commerce and industrious individuals, but without commerce and people to tax, there is no government. Government is the parasite with delusions of grandeur. The FakeNews / far-left / Democrats lied and claimed Obama was only talking about roads and bridges, when he clearly said, "If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that".